Zack Snyder: talking owls and Superman

The director talks to Marc Lee about his new film featuring warrior owls and
his forthcoming Superman adventure

Zack Snyder, director of Dawn of the Dead (2004), 300 (2006) and Watchmen (2009) – all made for strictly grown-up audiences – talks about his first family adventure Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, out this week, and the next Superman movie, which he is to direct for release in 2012.

Marc Lee: A movie about talking owls – you don’t get many of those…

Zack Snyder: No! But where this movie differs from traditional talking-animals stories is in its realism. I didn’t want to make a cartoon: that’s where this movie jumps off from what you would expect from a talking-owl movie…

What was your starting point?

I’d seen this series of paintings that [Australian digital effects company] Animal Logic had prepared for Warner Bros, and they were just amazing – textural, awesome, super-dark and fun. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ And I said, ‘That’s the movie: let’s not lose the vision.’

What was the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge for me was just restraining myself because once you get into this computer-generated, virtual-camera world you can lose your mind and go crazy and put in anything.

Owl anatomy is so different from human anatomy. If you look at Happy Feet, the penguins are [based on] people in penguin costumes, so the skeleton inside there is human. But the skeleton inside Soren [one of the main characters in Legend] is an owl’s. When we did the fight scenes, I wanted it to look as though the owls had a martial tradition, that they weren’t just flailing at each other but that they had learned this ritualised combat over a thousand years of evolution, like samurai or whatever.

The owls’ feathers look extraordinary, but did you want to avoid it looking hyper-real?

I wanted it to be photographic. I wanted [it to look like] real stuff filmed with bad cameras in the sense that the feathers would have the infinite detail that you’d want in a close-up, but I wanted the filmmaking to be real, not from a computer. What that means is that every now and then the shots are slightly out of focus.

When it comes to the reality of the feathers, that was what everybody was dedicated to – making them as awesome as we could.

The movie is in 3D. Was that necessary to achieve the look you wanted?

I was pretty adamant that we were going to make a 3D movie. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but, if anything should be 3D, a movie about flying owls should. It’s there to enhance the reality of the owl world, not to be a gimmick that pokes you in the eye. Every now and them we do that, but it’s really minimal compared with a normal 3D movie.

Has Hollywood’s obsession with 3D got out-of-hand? It now seems to be the default position when it comes to animation…

I believe it’s here to stay for a while anyway.

How different was it for you working with actors who were just providing voices?

You have a lot more time with the voice record than with live action. There’s no one else there, you don’t have to set up lights, you’re not losing daylight. You record over a period of a few days, so each scene, each line you can do again and again.

Helen Mirren, who voices Nyra, the evil queen owl, has rather famously played a monarch before. That must have helped…

She’s incredibly collaborative and incredibly kind with her talent. I’d say Nyra is sexy but she is also powerful, and Helen knew just how to achieve that. Geoffrey [Rush, who plays an owl called Ezylryb] is the same. Katherine [Lasky, writer of the Ga’Hoole books] said Ezylryb is like Winston Churchill. So we sent Geoffrey a bunch of Churchill speeches, and that was his way into the part.

This is your first non-R-rated movie. You’ve got six children: it must be good that they can see what you do for a living at last…

Violence in my movies is mostly there to express a point of view. I’ve never made an R-rated movie like the Saw movies; they’re not about psychotic violence. Mostly the violence in my movies has has hopefully been there to make some sort of social statement. The point of Legend is that it’s a family film, an adventure film.

You’re directing the next Superman movie: that’s quite a gig. How do you feel about taking on the superhero that everyone loves?

It’s very exciting. Do I feel responsible? Look, as a fan, I want to make it awesome, so in that way I feel responsible. There’s an amazing film in there to be had, and I’m excited to get at it.

You’re working with Christopher Nolan, director of the last two Batman films (and the next one). Is there a conflict of interest there? Batman v Superman?

He is a generous and amazing talent and, as a producer, super-supportive even in just the few weeks we’ve been talking about it.

What can you say about it at this stage?

Nothing. It’s very early in the process and it’s going to be famously guarded. So there’s very little to be said other than I’m a huge fan and I’m excited to get started on this.

It’s going to be a reboot of the franchise…

In the sense that it doesn’t really owe anything to what’s happened before cinematically.

And apparently you’re getting $175 million to play with…

I have no idea. Nobody has said anything to me about that, but I’ll quote that at them. It’s a good place to start in the negotiations.